Bernese Mt. Dog Love

I’m working on a poem about our beloved Oliver right now but first wanted to tell this little story. It is about how Quinn and Oliver helped to bring two families together. It is a story about how we had to lose all of our old dogs at the same time and then bring in these new ones as an extension of our newly formed family. It is about my father, and his love of Oliver. 

Big dogs steal a big part of your heart. Yesterday our beloved Bernese mountain dog, Oliver, was put to sleep. He would have turned 8 at the end of this month.

Having a blended family is rough, even though we fortunately do not have any divorces or crazy custody battles attached to our family. My father was a widower and he married a widow. Suddenly our family turned into the Brady Bunch and then some!  We had 7 kids, 3 big dogs, and 3 young cats. It was completely insane but pretty fun despite the chaos!

The dogs were all old and a year after the marriage our yellow lab, Abbi, died. It was heart breaking, she had been my mother’s dog and like any milestone it was a feeling of losing another small part of my once vibrant mother. This dog had stared out our glass front door the first week after my mom had died. She protected my mom and our then black lab puppy, Maggi, from a crazed German Shepard. She survived because of emergency surgery in the dark no less, the next day I remember staring out the bus window to the street covered in her blood and fur She had been diagnosed with “over bonding” with our family and struggled with the new members of our family. She was smart, strong, and sweet but resisted being part of a blended family until the end...

After Abbi was gone, I came home from studying in Guatemala and that same day our other 2 dogs died. The Golden Retriever died exactly on her 14^th birthday and the black lab from a broken heart. I was at a BB King concert with my father that night and I was weeping. People joked that we had 2 dogs die in the same day, but it was the furthest thing from a joke… it was us moving to a new level of being a family. We had lost members of our individual families and we were starting to jell as a unit- the Hinkle- Wisniewski family.

So, we did not make it very long without a dog. A month later my dad and step mom brought home their baby… a Golden Retriever puppy named Quinn. Quinn was perfect. He never needed a leash, he came right back to you when called, and required the least amount of training my father has ever put into a dog. He knows worthless, yet entertaining tricks like “talk to the hand” where he will bark when you say it and how to chase his tail on command. He is sweet, loyal, and will always play fetch. Quinn gets upset when we swim without him at the cottage or if my father drives the boat past the island more than once, he cries. He will swim and be the “monkey in the middle” during g a game of Frisbee until he is completely worn out. Once he even rescued our elderly cottage neighbor when she fell and broke her hip in the woods. Nobody saw her but Quinn, he got my dad’s attention. Quinn is truly the “all American” dog!

Two years later started the Berner era. After a trip to Spain Cecily came back with more pictures of a friends Bernese Mountain Dog than the country.  She was obsessed with this tricolored beast of a dog. IT took little convincing of my father and within two weeks he made a long journey to Ohio to pick up burner puppy, Oliver.

Immediately Oliver stole my father’s heart like no other dog our family has ever had. He was stubborn, always ran and sat on the highest point he could find in true Swiss Alps fashion, was afraid of the water unlike any dog we have ever owned, had serious kankles and tree trunks for legs, a barrel chest, a white paint brush tip of his tail, and would growl on command when you called him “big boy”.

Oliver could leap great heights from a standing position, but would always get up for me when I walked down the hall somehow knowing I could not see him. He would bound through snow banks with this past winter being his favorite of all time. He had all the best Berner qualities: herd you by nudging      you with his big nose in the thigh, give gentle long hugs, and lean into you so hard sometimes to the point of knowing you over. As Quinn always looks at the person he is sitting next to, Oliver sat with his back to you protecting his block.

Yesterday, my parents had to put him tosleeep. He had a heart tumor only discovered two days before. It had been growing for four months but the symptoms came on suddenly and quickly. The tumor was so big that this week he had stopped eating and was really only sleeping. My dad is his great wisdom wanted him to have dignity and the best quality of life. They stayed with him as my father’s high school buddy, our trusted “Dr. Bob the best vet ever and a Berner owner himself, put Ollie to sleep.

The big house is much quieter now and Quinn is following my step mom around everywhere. I can feel in my own heart space, from across the country, my father’s grief in losing his greatest dog companion. ]

At the end of the day the black floor on the white carpet, scratches in eh walnut floors, and smudge marks on the windows mean nothing compared to the love of a Berner. They are gentle, kind, loyal, gives the best hugs.

The Hinkle- Wisniewski family will move forward, growing with more grandchildren and probably another Berner in the future.  There will never be another Ollie Doodle but his memory, and fur in the corners of the house, will live on forever.

I love and miss you Oliver.

Here is more information about the greatest dog breed:  

Bernese mountain dog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernese_Mountain_Dog